Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (33 page)

“I did not win the Olympic gold medal,” Clarke told
Sports Illustrated
in 1973, “and that has given rise to the idiotic idea that I was not good in real competition. My only contention, and I’m leaning over backward to be fair, is that because of the altitude at Mexico City I had no chance against the Africans, and therefore the critics’ point that I was incapable of winning remains unproved. Personally, I have no doubt at all that I was the best 10,000-meter runner in the world in 1968. At sea level, I would have won easily.”

For the record, Kenya’s Temu won the 10,000-meter gold, with his countryman Kip Keino in contention until he suffered stomach cramps. Temu’s gold was the first ever for Kenya, which seems remarkable considering the running legacy the nation now enjoys. “This feels like Africa,” Temu said of the conditions in Mexico City. “ We will be at home here.”

Meanwhile, that meant trouble for Ryun, who was scheduled to go against Keino and the Kenyans in track’s showcase event, the men’s 1,500 meters. He was entering the contest as a favorite, but so had Clarke heading into the 10,000 meters.

The night before the 1,500 meters, Kenyan officials told Ben Jipcho to go out hard from the opening gun. Keino, who had taken a bronze medal in the 5,000 meters, would trail him and later charge to the finish. The fast pace from the outset, they proposed, would take care of Ryun. The Kenyans’ plan almost didn’t have a chance to work, however, as their team bus got waylaid in traffic leading to the Olympic stadium. Both Keino and Jipcho were forced to jog nearly three miles and barely made the event. (“They had to warm up before the race anyway,” said a team official.) Yet when the gun went off, Jipcho moved out in a fast 56-second first lap, hoping to lure Ryun to come with him.

“So what do you do when you have never gone faster than a 61-second opening pace per 400 and your competition goes out in 56?” asked Dr. Jack Daniels, the U.S. team’s expert about altitude training. “Do you go with them not knowing if everyone will die together or let him go hoping he will come back?”

Ryun correctly determined that Keino, not Jipcho, was the guy to beat. So he hung back. It also crossed Ryun’s mind that “I’ve never tried this at altitude and I better be careful so I don’t completely die.”

In the second lap, Keino began to pull away from Ryun and the American was forced to let him go. By the third lap, the field had split into two groups. Keino led the first pack, with Ryun leading the other. By that point, any chance of gold had disappeared for Ryun.

By the bell lap the American was forty meters behind the Kenyan as he gamely continued to fight his way from tenth place up to second. In the end, though, he finished a long ways behind Keino. The race can still be found on YouTube and by the final stretch the Kenyan champion is the only runner in the frame. “That much ground was simply impossible to recover,” Richard Hoffer wrote, “and the greatest miler of his day finished in second, a full twenty meters behind Keino. It was the largest margin of victory, or rather defeat, ever.”

While Keino and Jipcho took a victory lap, a fatigued Ryun told a bystander, “God, it hurts.” Afterward Jipcho apologized to the American for the team tactics by the Kenyans. Ryun told him it was the Olympics and not to feel guilty about anything. Even though Ryun’s silver-medal finish was vilified back home, U.S. distance runners and coaches came away with valuable lessons about how to compete at altitude. Despite the conditions, all three U.S. entrants in the 1,500 meters—Ryun, Tom Von Ruden, and Marty Liquori—reached the final.

In the end, Roone Arledge’s gamble paid off. Thanks to Ryun’s heroic race, Bob Beamon’s stunning record leap in the long jump, Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s fist-raised protest atop the podium after the two-hundred meters, the Olympics became must-see television and remain so to this day.

Closer to home, following the Tigers’ World Series victory, Denny McLain and Bob Gibson were each named both the Cy Young winners and Most Valuable Players for their respective leagues. New York Yankees pitcher Stan Bahnsen was selected as the top rookie in the American League, with Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench edging out New York Mets pitcher Jerry Koosman for the honor in the National League.

Tigers manager Mayo Smith was named manager of the year, with Detroit general manager Jim Campbell selected as baseball’s top executive.

The fourth game of the World Series, the one played in a downpour in Detroit, became the highest-rated sports event in television history at the time. The Nielsen Television Index indicated that more than 78.5 million people tuned in that afternoon. World Series games continued to outpace other sporting events, including Super Bowl II and the NFL championship, holding an overall seven-to-three edge in the TV’s top ten. “From the rankings, it is easy to conclude that the World Series is still America’s No. 1 sports event,” baseball commissioner William Eckert said in a statement.

Just a Hail Mary pass off Interstate 295 in southern New Jersey, stands a two-story, space-age-style office building that serves as the home of NFL Films. Even though baseball was atop the sports heap as the ’68 World Series began, the soothsayers in the sports industry recognized that a sea change was coming. That’s why I’m here, in the far corner of the NFL Films library, hard by the stacks that bolster every
Sports Illustrated
ever printed, staring at a Trinitron television rigged up to a DVC Pro Slow Motion tape machine. The idea is if we can conjure up time, slow it down frame by frame, perhaps we can glimpse the moments where baseball slips into second place and football becomes king.

Certainly there were hints of such a reversal back in 1968. The year began with O. J. Simpson, then the top running back for Southern Cal, on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. But while other sporting events—such as the Super Bowl, select boxing matches, and some Olympiads—occasionally managed to escape baseball’s shadow to draw plenty of media coverage and public attention of their own, one could argue such upheavals in the sporting landscape were temporary at best, distractions before things returned to baseball. With its dog days building up to the Fall Classic followed by the renewed countdown to spring training, the national pastime still set the tone and the calendar for sports in America. By’68, though—as with so much else—the stage was set for change. Of all things, it would take a miscue in television scheduling for the powers that be in football, especially those in the upstart American Football League, to realize how swiftly the winds of change were shifting, and just how popular the new kid on the block had become.

After cueing up on the Trinitron, I watch the final minutes of a regular-season game held on November 17, 1968, between the New York Jets and the host Oakland Raiders. Both teams have gunslingers at quarterback—Joe Namath for the Jets and Daryle Lamonica for the Raiders. Although each team boasted quality personnel on both sides of the ball, it was still widely regarded that the best teams resided in the more established National Football League, where they had been playing since the early 1940s when George Halas’s “Monsters of the Midway” in Chicago first made headlines. Of course, that thinking had been further solidified by Vince Lombardi’s Green Packers, which had won the first two Super Bowls handily over AFL teams (the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders).

Yet after Lombardi stepped down as coach the champion Packers fell to a 6–7–1 record in ’68, and despite such household names as Bart Starr and Ray Nitschke, they didn’t come close to defending their division. Instead, the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Colts were NFL’s top teams that season, and they were regarded as the best in any league.

Studying the film of the Jets-Raiders game, channeling my inner Ron Jaworski, I realize it doesn’t take a genius to be impressed by what’s flashing by on the screen. Of course, I’m watching the game for reasons that go beyond any ability I may have to grade the top running backs on these teams (Matt Snell and Charlie Smith) or be enthralled by how both quarterbacks can throw the long ball with regularity. For this was the infamous “Heidi Game,” a contest that not only rewrote how sports was broadcast in this country, but reassured followers of the rival AFL that they had plenty of company and rabid fans.

With sixty-five seconds left, the Jets held a 32–29 lead. Both squads were considered among the best in the ten-team AFL, entering the game with 7–2 records. Even though the game was still close, NBC ended the broadcast early in the Eastern and Central time zones. The network schedule called for a made-for-TV movie,
Heidi
, to start at 7 p.m. sharp. As soon as the switch was made, calls began to pour into the NBC switchboard. Network executives tried to reach broadcast operations, telling them to keep the game on, but those calls didn’t go through until the game was well over. And what a game it was. The Raiders stormed back in the final minutes, scoring two touchdowns, to win 43–32. The programming switch was so abrupt that announcers Curt Gowdy and Al DeRogatis didn’t know. In fact, Gowdy’s call of the winning touchdown (“Lamonica to Charlie Smith . . . Smith is heading . . . and he scores. What a game!”) remains old-school classic.

For the record, the Raiders went ahead on that pass from Lamonica to Smith, and then salted the game away by recovering the ensuing kickoff in the end zone when the Jets fumbled.

While the action on the field was great, the reaction off the field was even better. When Jets’ coach Weeb Ewbank, still fuming about what happened, reached the visiting locker room he was told he had a phone call. It was his wife, eager to congratulate him on the victory. She, and a lot of other fans, thought the Jets had won because they were ahead when NBC cut away.

“ Win?” Ewbank replied. “Hell, we got beat.”

With that he slammed down the receiver.

John Madden, who went on to greater fame as a broadcaster and product pitchman, was the Raiders’ coach that day. “We knew we won the game,” he said, “but people across the country thought the Jets had won and we had lost.”

New York quarterback Joe Namath had the best line about the fiasco: “I didn’t get a chance to see it, but I heard it was great.”

Back in New York, the switchboard at NBC shut down due to the large volume of calls. Like it or not, America was watching
Heidi
, starring Jennifer Edwards, the stepdaughter of Julie Andrews, in the title role, along with Maximillian Schell, Jean Simmons, and Michael Redgrave.

Unbelievably, NFL Films also has
Heidi
available to researchers. So after seeing the end of the game, I figured it’s only fitting that I check out what so many TV viewers were forced to endure. The made-for-TV movie opens in Frankfurt, at the turn of the last century, with a horse-drawn carriage pulling up in front of a stately mansion. The going is slow, slow, slow, with plenty of German accents.

“Don’t make me stay here,” Heidi says, and most football fans would wholeheartedly agree. They wanted to be back at the game, listening to Gowdy and DeRogatis.

Unable to find a home in Frankfurt, Heidi is sent off to the Swiss Alps to live with her hermitlike grandfather. “There was a considerable amount of plot information in the first reel,” director Delbert Mann explained. “If you’d come into the show in progress you wouldn’t know what was going on.”

Due to its exclusive contract with sponsor Timex, the movie was required to begin at 7 p.m. sharp. And that’s what Dick Cline, the network’s broadcast operations supervisor, made sure happened. Too late, network president Julian Goodman got through to Cline, telling him to put the game back on the air. By then the game was over and the video link to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum already cut.

NBC scrambled to make amends, and the network’s timing couldn’t have been worse.

At 8:40 p.m. EST, NBC aired an ominous-looking alert that crawled along the bottom third of the screen with the final score. Unfortunately, it appeared during one of the film’s crucial scenes. Heidi’s cousin, Clara, who is paralyzed and living out her days in a wheelchair, has summoned up the courage to try to walk again. With the backdrop of snow-capped peaks, she falls, begging for help. Mann,
Heidi
’s director, nearly fell out of his chair when he saw the NBC crawler appear at that very moment.

Everything came together at a “disastrous point in terms of the picture,” Mann said decades later. “The little girl cousin, who has been crippled, is trying desperately to crawl and stand and start to walk, and the wheelchair rolls away. It was really quite a tense moment.”

So tense that Mann began to jump up and down in front of the television, cursing his own production. He wasn’t the only unhappy camper. By this point, the switchboard at NBC had ceased to function. Instead, irate viewers called NBC affiliates, local radio stations, and newspapers. In fact, the
New York Times
and NYPD absorbed so many calls in protest that the phone grid in Manhattan nearly went down. “Ten years before it wouldn’t have caused such an uproar,” NBC executive Scott Connell said. “[But] that’s how important football and televised sports had become.”

Soon after the film ended, NBC president Goodman issued a statement, calling the incident “a forgivable error committed by humans who were concerned about children expecting to see Heidi at 7 p.m.”

He added, “I missed the game as much as anyone else.”

Of course, back in ’68, television ratings weren’t as detailed as they are today. What the football moguls, especially those with the AFL, discovered was that their game was more popular with the general public than they even realized. Television executive Dick Ebersol said that the “Heidi Game” occurred “when the public was making the major leap from having baseball as the American pastime to making a full-body decision that football was the national game.”

The bottom line was that football was “a better match for TV than baseball,” said Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “People had been realizing that since they got their first television back in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. By the time we get to 1968, it’s really becoming clear that baseball may be America’s pastime, but football is television’s sport.